A Day At The Inn: The Redwood
As most of you know, staying at a small inn like Tucker House Inn is dramatically different from standard hotel lodging. Guests enjoy personal contact with the inn owners, staff members are generally more engaging, the rooms have much more charm and personality, and there’s an overall sense of calm and quiet.
You may wonder what the innkeepers do all day when there are no guests to check in, no breakfasts to cook. Let me tell you, there’s never a dull moment around here. Recently we had a problem with one of our beautiful old redwoods. It had a sucker that was rotten, sapping the life from the main trunk, and was growing at a dangerous angle. The whole thing was threatening the safety of our stand-alone “Log Cabin” cottage. It had to come down.
Dispatching it was a grueling two-day process. Special arborists were called in to detach the 32-foot giant sucker, then good ol’ Joe, our island wood miller spent the next day cutting it. Being recycle/reuse advocates, Dave and Anna Maria, our inn owners, were determined to salvage as much as possible for milling into a huge rustic dining table. That meant the pieces were 8-foot lengths and roughly 24-inches in diameter – no easy chore to haul around. Our Head Gardener Octavio, Innkeepers John and Erin, and good friend Bruce spent four hours muscling the logs onto boards stacked as a ramp against the bed of the truck. Bruises, crushed toes, bumped heads, sore muscles were sustained by the sweating laborers, as Mollie, Lily, and Maya, our resident canines, supervised.
The wood is now milled and drying in Dave’s shop here on the property, and the redwood tree stands proud and beautiful beside the Log Cabin. Another Day At The Inn whizzes by.
After 10 years as staff photographer for the LA Times, Kathleen Ballard moved to San Juan Island where she has been creating special images for almost thirty years. Her work has appeared in Sunset Magazine and in island galleries.